From: Edward C. D. Hopkins (chopkins@ameritech.net)
Date: Fri Apr 04 2003 - 14:07:12 EST
William,
Yes, I am very interested in the Unicode aspects of handling multiple glyphs
of one Greek character. My original thoughts were to use the PUA, but some
knowledgeable people have suggested I ask for advice on this list for ideas
before using the PUA.
Essentially, I have two issues. First is the encoding of multiple glyphs for
one Greek character. Please see
http://parthia.com/fonts/images/alt-charmap.jpg for the current layout of
the glyphs. The font will also contain a few numismatic symbols not already
in the Unicode. Compounding this problem is that OpenType substitution
features do not seem to be widely supported and I need a usable font in the
near future that works across the spectrum of Unix, Mac, and Windows
applications, including sorting in databases.
Second problem is the construction of a (second and distinct?) font that
contains over a thousand Hellenistic monograms which James Kass has
accurately identified in another message of this thread. I have some 20 Mac
Type 1 fonts containing the glyphs and can post samples if asked. These
monogram fonts are currently used by scholars, museums and commercial firms
in publishing catalogs of numismatic items. My font-making efforts will
concern only the Hellenistic, Parthian and Bactrian monograms, but there are
probably tens of thousand of them if all the coinage through history is
considered.
Cheers,
Chris Hopkins
> This looks an interesting discussion and I hope that you will ask your
> questions in this forum.
>
> The matter of multiple alternate glyphs for each character seems at first
a
> font issue, and it is partly a font issue, yet it is also a Unicode issue
> once one starts trying to encode a document which is intended to apply
those
> glyphs in some controlled selection manner. For example, are you going to
> have some texts such as "Author A uses the symbol X for beta whereas
author
> B uses the symbol Y for beta." where X and Y are just two of the "multiple
> alternate glyphs" which you mentioned?
>
> What please is a Hellenistic monogram? I am wondering whether this is
going
> to be a good application of the Private Use Area, either on a permanent
> basis or on a temporary basis pending making a formal encoding
application.
> In either case, reading about the Private Use Area in Chapter 13 of the
> Unicode specification available from the http://www.unicode.org webspace
may
> prove interesting.
>
> William Overington
>
> 4 April 2003
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